In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 "passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative." In December 2023, ChatGPT became the first non-human to be included in Nature's 10, an annual listicle curated by Nature of people considered to have made significant impact in science. A 2023 study reported that GPT-4 obtained a better score than 99% of humans on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft.
- In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information.
- In October 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser integrating the ChatGPT assistant directly into web navigation, to compete with existing browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari.
- These include, among many others, writing and debugging computer programs, composing music, scripts, fairy tales, and essays, answering questions (sometimes at a level exceeding that of an average human test-taker), and generating business concepts.
- ChatGPT’s training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia.
- OpenAI’s outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California.
- Kelsey Piper of Vox wrote that “ChatGPT is the general public’s first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten” and that ChatGPT is “smart enough to be useful despite its flaws”.
- The uses and potential of ChatGPT in health care has been the topic of scientific publications and experts have shared many opinions.
Astell&Kern ends 2025 with even more flagship product launches
Some, including Nature and JAMA Network, "require that authors disclose the use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT as a co-author". This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. Over 20,000 signatories including Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed a March 2023 open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing "profound risks to society and humanity". OpenAI said it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old. Italian regulators assert that ChatGPT was exposing minors to age-inappropriate content, and that OpenAI's use of ChatGPT conversations as training data could violate Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. ChatGPT also provided an outline of how human reviewers are trained to reduce inappropriate content and to attempt to provide political information without affiliating with any political position.
ChatGPT's training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia. Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as "torture". To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers acted as both the user and the AI assistant.
One study analyzed ChatGPT's responses to 517 questions about software engineering or computer programming posed on Stack Overflow for correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and concision. Chris Granatino, a librarian at Seattle University, noted that while ChatGPT can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real or largely incorrect. Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generated peer review report on his article mentioned nonexistent studies. In January 2023, Science "completely banned" LLM-generated text in all its journals; however, this policy was just to give the community time to decide what acceptable use looks like.
… It's also a way to understand the "hallucinations", or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and a browsing mode (with Internet access). Premium users were originally limited in the number of messages they could send to the new model, but OpenAI increased and eventually removed these limits. GPT-4, which was released on March 14, 2023, was made available via API and for premium ChatGPT users. The model can also generate new images based on existing ones provided in the prompt, which can, for example, be used to transform images with specific styles or inpaint areas.
GPT-4o
On August 19, 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India, a low-cost subscription plan priced at ₹399 per month, offering ten times higher message, image generation, and file-upload limits, double the memory span compared to the free version, and support for UPI payments. In October 2023, OpenAI's image generation model DALL-E 3 was integrated into ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise. According to the company, the paid version of the website was still experimental, but provided access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features, and faster response speeds. In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costs US$20 per month.
The judge asked ChatGPT other questions about the case and formulated his final decision in light of its answers. ChatGPT can produce correct answers to medical exam and licensing questions, for example the United States Medical Licensing Examination and the Specialty Certificate Examination in Dermatology. The chatbot can assist patients seeking clarification about their health. The uses and potential of ChatGPT in health care has been the topic of scientific publications and experts have shared many opinions.
It found that 52% of the responses contained inaccuracies and 77% were verbose. ChatGPT has been used to generate introductory sections and abstracts for scientific articles. Andrew Ng argued that "it's a mistake to fall for the doomsday hype on AI—and that regulators who do will only benefit vested interests." Yann LeCun dismissed doomsday warnings of AI-powered misinformation and existential threats to the human race. Juergen Schmidhuber said that in 95% of cases, AI research is about making "human lives longer and healthier and easier." He added that while AI can be used by bad actors, it "can also be used against the bad actors". A May 2023 statement by hundreds of AI scientists, AI industry leaders, and other public figures demanded that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority". Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "fathers of AI", voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence.
Model versions
The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations. The chatbot has also been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. ChatGPT's website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, It has been lauded for its potential to transform numerous professional fields, and instigated public debate about the nature of creativity and the future of knowledge work. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, an ongoing period marked by rapid investment and public attention toward the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text luck of spins casino review in submitted papers. As of July 2025, Science expects authors to release in full how AI-generated content is used and made in their work. As of 2023, there were several pending U.S. lawsuits challenging the use of copyrighted data to train AI models, with defendants arguing that this falls under fair use. In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information.
GPT-4.5
ChatGPT was initially free to the public, and OpenAI planned to monetize the service later. It has an additional feature called "agentic mode" that allows it to take online actions for the user. In October 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser integrating the ChatGPT assistant directly into web navigation, to compete with existing browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple's Safari. In March 2025, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to generate images using GPT-4o instead of DALL-E. It allows ChatGPT to search the web in an attempt to make more accurate and up-to-date responses. To prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and produced by ChatGPT, queries are filtered through the OpenAI "Moderation endpoint" API (a separate GPT-based AI).
- These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future.
- To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content.
- The term “hallucination” as applied to LLMs is distinct from its meaning in psychology, and the phenomenon in chatbots is more similar to confabulation or bullshitting.
- ChatGPT can produce correct answers to medical exam and licensing questions, for example the United States Medical Licensing Examination and the Specialty Certificate Examination in Dermatology.
- As ChatGPT follows a dialogue format, it is also able to answer follow-up questions, elaborate on previous responses and rework results accordingly.
- One such workaround, popularized on Reddit in early 2023, involved making ChatGPT assume the persona of “DAN” (an acronym for “Do Anything Now”), instructing the chatbot that DAN answers queries that would otherwise be rejected by the content policy.
The user can interrupt tasks or provide additional instructions as needed. In July 2025, OpenAI released ChatGPT agent, an AI agent that can perform multi-step tasks. It is capable of writing software, answering codebase questions, running tests, and proposing pull requests. According to TechCrunch, it is a service based on o3 that combines advanced reasoning and web search capabilities to make comprehensive reports within 5 to 30 minutes.
How does ChatGPT work?
A study presented example attacks on ChatGPT, including jailbreaks and reverse psychology. ChatGPT is programmed to reject prompts that may violate its content policy. The term "hallucination" as applied to LLMs is distinct from its meaning in psychology, and the phenomenon in chatbots is more similar to confabulation or bullshitting. These limitations may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people. OpenAI has sometimes mitigated this effect by updating the training data. ChatGPT's training data only covers a period up to the cut-off date, so it lacks knowledge of recent events.
These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of proximal policy optimization. The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. The chatbot can facilitate academic dishonesty, generate misinformation, and create malicious code. The service gained 100 million users in two months making it the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. Although there are paid tiers available, ChatGPT is otherwise free-to-use and can be accessed via web, mobile and desktop.
ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history. In The Atlantic magazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is". Samantha Lock of The Guardian noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text.